Questions
by CardioQueen
Summary: Bang. Another 3.133.14 one shot.


Cristina sat on the cold granite countertop, her knees drawn against her chest tightly, shivering lightly under the sweatshirt and pajama pants hugging her body. Her eyes followed the trail of mess that she'd made while Burke was absent from their home, a beer bottle here, a box of cereal there, clothes scattered throughout the living room.

The cake.

Pushing the thought away from her head she drug her knees closer to her, a black curl falling in her face unwelcome, and she pushed it away, laying her head to her knees.

She felt the poke of the ring adorning her finger pressing into her arm, and lightened her grip a little, trying to ignore the fact that it was there.

Why was it there?

Did she just say yes because she'd felt bad about the things that she'd done? The things that she'd said? Did she say yes because of the things he'd said to her? Because she thought putting the damn thing on her finger would mean that it would all be better just because she wore his ring now?

She let out a long exhale and cursed herself inwardly. Why the hell did she say yes? It should be a simple answer to a simple question, but the complexities of it scared her.

The level of commitment that was required of this ring scared her.

Giving up surgery as a specialty was out of the question, giving up cardiothoracics as her future was out of the question.

Sure, it was convenient that he was a cardiothoracic surgeon, but long before she met him, she dreamt of open heart surgeries and abdominal aortic aneurysms when other girls were dreaming of prom and graduating from high school.

But Preston Burke did not determine her dreams. He did not determine her future, or her path. And nothing he could do would change her dreams or her path.

Or at least she used to think so.

She also used to think of him as a cocky and arrogant asshole.

Her mind wandered to the damn intern mixer that she'd attended, first put off by the fact that she was the only one who dressed down for the occasion, figuring that enough women would be there to flaunt their assets as it were, and not their skill or brain. She didn't feel the need to be one of those girls.

She remembered seeing him on the couch, flirtatiously trying to bed one of those girls, and the excitement that fired off every neuron in her body as she approached him.

She had even spit her damn gum out for him.

But he blew her off, instead interested in the assets of the girl next to him that were plainly obvious instead of the assets in her that were much more valuable, much more pertinent to that night.

Everything after that seemed to happen so quickly though, her first day of internship he blew her off for the fetus, then after that there was coffee and kissing and babies, and it all blurred together in her mind, a mixture of emotions she'd worked for years to tuck away. Emotions she'd worked to cover up with an impeccable knowledge of vasculature, lab values, suture patterns and surgical instruments. Emotions that she thought now, she'd rather not have.

He was Preston Burke. Never meant to be more than a great surgeon, the chief of surgery of Seattle Grace Hospital. A teacher, a mentor.

Not the person who tore down the walls she'd worked so long to build up, not the person to pull out the emotions she'd tucked neatly away in some corner of her pocket.

Not the person who could break her heart with vocalized frustrations and utterances, or even the lack thereof.

Not the love of her life.

She never had questions she couldn't answer, she never had answers she couldn't find. Everything was always so clear to her until he came along.

Now he was making her question everything she'd ever known.

Cristina pulled her left hand from under her arm where she'd been hiding it, trying to keep the ring from her vision, trying to keep her answer from her head and her eyes drifted down to it, studying it intensely, as if some answer would formulate in her head.

Three little glittering diamonds welded to a simple gold band.

How could one little thing carry so many responsibilities, so many connotations? So much commitment?

How could she possibly commit and keep her dreams to?

She looked up to the bedroom where he slept and her heart swelled within her just a little as he snored lightly, happy that he was home from the hospital, that he was back in there bed.

And that she was welcome in that bed.

Thoughts trailed across her mind at an increasing rate as she thought of the emotions overwhelming her when he'd closed the door in her face. When he'd quit speaking to her, when the love in his eyes that had once been there every time he looked at her had faded.

When her body ached for the touch he would not give her.

He had forced her to take steps in her life, he had forced those emotions out of her, but if it scared her so much, why did she stay? Why did she feel as if she needed him so?

She moved from the counter, grabbing the beer bottle and dropping it into the trashcan with a jarring ring, pulling Burke from his peaceful sleep and he looked up to her groggily.

"Cristina?" His voice called out to her with the thickness of a man wrenched from his dreams. "Are you coming to bed?"

"Yeah, baby." She replied absently, grabbing the cereal box to put it away, "In a minute."

He laid his head back against the pillow and she crept across the living room, picking up her clothes, shirt by shirt and putting it in a neater pile on the couch to be put away later, trying to restore some semblance of the obsessively clean apartment that he preferred.

She was still trying to figure out why she had said yes. It should be such an obvious answer amongst so many unanswerable questions.

It wasn't that she wanted to fix things, that she wanted to cover up the past with promises of the future.

Cristina knew what it took to make him happy, even more, she knew how to make him happy. Simple things made him happy; sleeping close to her at night, the warmth of their bodies shared, eating breakfast together in the morning, sharing naps in the call room at work over lunch breaks, seeing her in the gallery, her hand pressed against the glass as he worked tediously to repair broken hearts.

It was simplistic, easy.

More than that though, he knew how to make her happy. Though she was more complex, he had figured out how to make her smile when she was in the grumpiest of moods, how to make her day a bit easier, even with just having a travel mug with coffee in it.

He knew her unlike anybody else. He knew her ambitions, her dreams. He knew some of the most intimate details about her, though she still kept so much to herself.

Burke knew when to push her forward, and when to let her hold back, have reservations.

And maybe it wasn't that he expected her to give up her dreams, but maybe, just maybe, he wanted to show her that he could be a part of those dreams. That just because she was committing to their love, didn't mean that she couldn't still be Cristina Yang.

Or perhaps, he was always a part of those dreams and she hadn't even realized it.

As she moved into the bed next to him and his body automatically found its way to hers, even in sleep, the answer finally made itself clear in her head as to why she had said yes, and in true Cristina fashion, it was only another question.

How could she not want to spend the rest of her life with him?


End file.
